Intel's lone ranger and Principal Engineer Francois Piednoel last night sent out an interesting tweet for anyone following Intel's XMM7160 LTE modem development. Francois posted a video showing LTE working on the Baytrail tablet FFRD platform with XMM7160 inside on a live LTE network, presumably AT&T's. The short video shows speedtest.net downstream throughput of about 55 Mbps inside a busy downtown San Francisco Starbucks cafe.

We also caught a glimpse of XMM7160 in a multimode data card form factor alongside an MDM9615 based design with comparable capabilities. This is the first good look we've been able to get of the baseband alongside DRAM and NANDMCP, PMIC, and above it, transceiver, filters, and power amplifier – the entire reference design implementation. The baseband is the part marked XG716 (X Gold 716) and the transceiver is the other Intel marked part. This kind of module would go into a notebook or tablet form factor for multimode 3G/4G LTE connectivity.

I look forward to your review of this chip. The review will provide insight whether Intel may gain significant smartphone share near term. Second, there is a position help by some haters that Intel's success is solely attributable to a combination of their dominant market share and superior process technology. Preliminary reports are that this chip is smaller than the competitors, more energy efficient than competitors, and fabbed at TSMC just like competitors. If accurate, this supports the position that by virtue of it's investments over time, Intel is flat out smarter than competitors. The chip lacks any process advantage and Intel is starting with an inferior market share. If Intel' TSMC product is better than competitor's TSMC product, Intel is scary good.Reply

"If accurate, this supports the position that by virtue of it's investments over time, Intel is flat out smarter than competitors."

While it's obvious that "smarter" people are "better" innovators, usually superiority in this sense is attributable to one company having more resources (read: money) than the other. I'd imagine pretty much all of the engineers are brilliant -- individual intelligence is unlikely to be a major factor at play here. Instead, Intel likely just has more smart guys, not smarter guys.Reply